Top 10 Unanswered Questions in Geek Movies

[TC Pilot]

Actually, I'm going to go ahead and concede the issue at this point. I managed to find the writers' comments on it being an alternate timeline of Star Trek so yeah, I'm wrong.

[Stark]

That doesn't necessarily follow; it can be an 'alternate timeline' without saying anything about time travel in ST... since the original timeline isn't necessarily the TNG timeline.

[Batman]

I was always under the impression that the 'branching timeline' explanation for time travel (AND virtually identical parallel universes) was generally accepted around here because it makes the least amount of no sense.

[Stark]

Whether it's 'accepted' and whether it flows from the evidence is different. I don't feel the nTrek movie is necessarily evidence for 'only many worlds' time travel in ST because it isn't necessarily related to 'old' Trek at all. There's a lot fo support for 'many worlds' travel in oST, but whether it's impossible to do it another way shouldn't be affected by nST.

[Batman]

Um-I didn't say a word about nuTrek? Branching timelines has been around and accepted as the least atrocious explanation for time travel in Trek since long before that movie was even considered.

[Stark]

So shut the fuck up, because TC Pilot -was- talking about nTrek and appeared to give up an argument he perhaps shouldn't have, since nTrek is totally divorced from old Trek and thus isn't necessarily justification for anything stupid in the old movies. In short, his objections if reasonable should not be withdrawn because Abrams says his movie is an 'alternate timeline'.

[Batman]

Sorry? The debate quite a while ago moved to the workings of Trek time travel in general, what with all those mentions of 'Yesterday's Enterprise', 'Parallels' 'First Contact' etc?

[TC Pilot]

That doesn't necessarily follow; it can be an 'alternate timeline' without saying anything about time travel in ST... since the original timeline isn't necessarily the TNG timeline.

Well, referring back to what we've been arguing, it basically boils down to "X way can't happen without X technobabble/magic" or "Y way can't happen without Y technobabble/magic," at least with the examples I pulled. Of course, then you have outliers like the whole Enterprise temporal cold war or the classic causal loop, but I don't think this is the time/place, or that it's within my capacity, to do some grand survey of ST time travel. I still haven't found any Paramount statement on the matter, but I'm just assuming the writers' statements is indicative of such an attitude on their part.